Family Follow-Up

Thanks for sharing this blog with your families! Three people reported sharing the blog with their families last night.

Today's focus was on handling a problem with another person. We identified four key components for handling these problems effectively.

Handling a problem-
1. Explain your perspective clearly.
2. Consider the other person's perspective.
3. Be assertive.
4. Avoid using blaming language.

To practice using these components, we broke into pairs and acted out 3 problem scenarios. During each scenario, we identified when and how these key components were being used.

Tonight: Help your teen practice identifying examples of perspective taking. This means that you need to show both good examples and "non-examples". After presenting your example, you can ask you teen, "was that an example of perspective taking?" We have found that our group needs practice noticing (discriminating between examples and non-examples)

Example 1 Parent: "John, I can understand why you are feeling tired, it sounds like you guys did a lot of work at Promontory Point." Parent the asks--"Did I do a good job taking your perspective?" Student: "Yes"

Non-example 1 Parent: "I am sorry I've been asking you to do so much around the house tonight?" (This is a non-example because you have not taken the perspective of the teen -- but it is really close because you are apologizing. We need to practice taking it one step further because one can apologize without acknowledging the other person's perspective).